


A Little Bit Cliché

by just_another_classic



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Christmas Eve, Christmas Fluff, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 16:02:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5423261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_another_classic/pseuds/just_another_classic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Growing up in the system left Emma Swan with a fairly fractured worldview on all things viewed as wonderful, familial, cliché. That still doesn't stop her from finding her happy ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Bit Cliché

**Author's Note:**

> Enjoy the Post-Underworld fluff. Lord knows we all need it. Have yourself some merry little Christmas fluff.

Growing up in the system left Emma Swan with a fairly fractured worldview on all things viewed as wonderful, familial, _cliché_. It really was the result of bouncing from home-to-home, family-to-family, always wanting and never having that made her that way. Hope and everything it entailed was a weakness, because hope inevitably led to disappointment, because life and things never worked in her favor. Why should they? The world wasn’t fair, and she was a little girl with parents who abandoned her by the side of the road with no information but a name. Get placed with a nice family? Oops, they decided they wanted another kid. Begin to make a friend in school? Oops, time to get dumped to a different family in a different district, and never, ever see that potential new friend again. Meet a cute guy? He’s a felon who will leave you to rot in prison, pregnant, and not even the age of 18. She hated the stories that say everyone and everything ended “happily every after,” scoffed at the triviality of “everything works out in the end” because it so very rarely did in her reality.

She was the kid who stopped believing in Santa Claus very early on, because while other kids were gifted the latest gadgets and gizmos, she was lucky to receive anything. (And the gifts she did get? Oh, how she cherished them until they were inevitably lost, stolen, or broken.) Wishes upon stars were wastes of time, and the promises of ringing in the New Year with a kiss hardly rang true. They just didn’t happen. As she grew older, when friends asked her over for “Friendsgiving,” she deftly turned down their invitations, because she couldn’t handle that level of cheese, and holidays just weren’t her thing, okay? (She was thankful for having food on table, and not in the clichéd “thanks for the good food, Mom” sort of way, but the kind of thankfulness that comes from never having enough.) She celebrated her birthdays alone, and drank herself to oblivion when it came around to the birthday of the son whose life she continued to miss.

She would always make fun of that picket fence life, you know, the whole perfect house with the white fence and perfectly manicured lawn, inhabited by a loving couple and their 2.5 kids, and that overly loyal and spectacularly trained golden retriever. On the rare girls’ nights that she did allow herself, or the rare ones to which she was invited rather, she would play the cynic relaying that “he’s just not that into you” and stamping down all speculation of “true love” and “fairy tale romances.” They existed only in storybooks, not in real life, and even in fiction, they were fake as hell. There was no way that Elizabeth would actually end up with Mr. Darcy, because marriage then was more Charlotte and Mr. Collins, not the utterly unrealistic affair that was push-pull of Jane Austen’s most famous pair. Prince Charming was most certainly a creep, because who made out with sleeping women? And if that’s fiction’s best, what do real men have to offer? (Bleary walks of shame and the occasionally satisfying night of sex, that’s what.)

But now she’s a year over thirty and all of that pain and disbelief, the whole “running away from hope” thing feels so very far away. It’s Christmas Eve and she’s sitting in a house that’s gated by a white picket fence, surrounded by friends and family all laughing and happy. Marco is sitting in the corner dressed in red and white, clad in a fake beard pretending to be Santa Claus while Roland giggles merrily, Regina standing behind a camera and snapping a picture of the two. 

She doesn’t think Prince Charming is a creep anymore. Instead she calls him “Dad,” and he’s very much the romantic hero the stories made him out to be. She has parents now, and they are more than just the two people who abandoned her on the side of the road with nothing but a name and a blanket. They are two people who gave Emma her best chance, two people who have this unwavering faith in her. They are two people who love her. Sometimes it feels as if their love is too much, but it is so wonderful and assuring and everything that was missing.

She still doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, and takes assurance in the fact that no one else around her – children excepted – seem to have faith in him either. It’s quite a feat, actually, because the list of people currently celebrating in her house include Snow White and Prince Charming, the Evil Queen, Robin Hood, Gepetto, Pinocchio, five of seven dwarves, Tinkerbelle, Dr. Frankenstein, and whole host of “fictional” people who are very much real.

Oh, and Captain Hook.

The same Captain Hook who is engaged in a particularly enthusiastic conversation with Henry, her wonderful, fantastic son who she now has the chance to see grow into an even more spectacular man. Emma smiles as she watches Hook – Killian – gesticulate wildly with his right hand, the same right hand that once wore many rings, but now only sports one – the ring that belonged to his brother, the one that once hung around her neck, the one that she slid onto his finger during their very rushed wedding in hell. (The wedding that was officiated by his dead brother, by the way, since that is how weddings in the Underworld roll.) She now wears a ring too, one that the two of them had procured shortly after their jaunt in the Underworld. Because, yes, she found someone she could truly love, someone that she would follow through realms, and time, and to the very pits of hell. She found someone with whom she can share that picket fence life, with the house and the lawn and everything it entails.

The house is much too large, and the lawn is hardly manicured, not that she cares too much. She’s not a yard work kind of girl, never will be, and she doesn’t think Killian is either. Ships don’t have gardens, and landscape architecture seems to be of little interest to him. Though they do manage to keep alive a small patch of Middlemist flowers as a promise to one another to continue to have faith and trust in true love and all that jazz. She does find herself, however, thinking about the “much too large” descriptor of their home more and more, and the one way she knows how to fill it up, and she doesn’t seem to mind the idea. Actually, she more than doesn’t mind the idea, but really likes it quite a bit. Though they haven’t voiced _that_ particular desire out loud, she sees the way Killian watches her little brother or the way Robin’s arms wrap proudly around his little girl, easily recognizes that flicker of hope and want and _maybe someday_ in his gorgeous blue eyes. She recognizes it because she feels the same way too, she thinks. Yeah, maybe they should talk about that next step later.

(And even if they decide they aren’t ready yet, there’s still lots of practicing in confines of their bed that can be done in the meantime. Or on the couch. Or on the floor. She doesn’t really have a preference for how, only him.)

For now, she’s happy. For now, she’s eager to revel in the cliché that has become her life. She is a friend, a daughter, a mother, a wife. She isn’t an orphan, and in this moment, surrounded by those she loves, Emma Swan knows she has found her happy ending.

She loves the clichés.

(Oh, and it is snowing on Christmas Eve.)


End file.
